Barking

‘Customer Service’ has been on my mind for a while recently. It’s something that is important to us all and something (if I am brutally honest) that hasn’t been as great as it should have been over the last 18 months whilst I was ill.

All of this is changing, we’re building Resolve RM, a tool specifically designed to help you give great customer service, we’ve taken on a new project manager (who is helping to give me more time), and the feedback so far has been great.

I’ve also noticed that I have started writing more about customer service: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

So, drum roll please: I’ve added a new category to the blog and will be writing more about these as well as collecting other people’s experiences.

I’d love to hear your experiences and feedback, drop me an email to jake . stride [ at ] senokian . com, or catch me on Twitter.

Thanks to Joe Shlabotnik for the picture too.

It’s been a long time coming, but Paul our new project manager started at the beginning of the week.

I’d been trying to find somebody for about 3 months before Paul applied, and nobody prior to him was up to scratch. He had to give eight weeks notice, but it’s been worth the wait as already this week he has taken a huge workload off me.

Some of you may remember Paul from when he worked with us as a Shell STEP student a few years back. We set him off into the big wide World and he’s returned better for it, to manage our ongoing projects.

There’s a cheesy photo of him below, and he’s introduced himself below. He’s also putting together a few blog posts about his first week here and some of the issues we have trying to put some simple web-based project management systems in place this week.

Hmm, writing the following paragraph felt quite a lot like having to write a personal statement for UCAS applications all over again…

Hi, my name is Paul Bain and I’m the new Project Manager at Senokian. I’m one of the strange sorts of people who actually likes to organise complicated projects and work with large numbers of clients. I first worked with Senokian as a Shell STEP student a few years ago and enjoyed it so much that I decided to come back after gaining experience in systems development and support working for a large debt management charity.

So there you have it!

Just so people don’t think Coventry is all bad (there are some good bits) I’d thought I’d write about an excellent bit of food related service I received on Friday.

I had a meeting on Friday in London with a new client to finalise the specification for a new job that we are starting this week. As I had some time to kill I decided I would pop over the road to a little sandwich shop, called Loafers, that I have been to on a few occasions previously. Normally their service is excellent, stuff is freshly made, and service is with a smile. Today the service was exceptional.

The gentleman that served me is of a similar age to myself, was very cheerful when I arrived and asked me what I wanted. I ask for a bacon sandwich, to which he replied of course that’s no problem. As he wandered I off I casually asked him if I could have crispy bacon as I don’t like it when it’s not. I expected a ‘I’ll see what I’ve got’, the answer was actually, ‘of course I’ll go and make some now’. I couldn’t believe it! I’d have been happy with what I would have got but the nice man went above and beyond.

When they arrived, the bread was super fresh, the perfect amount of brown sauce was present and there was lots of bacon. A first class bacon butty and I will certainly be going back.

As I was leaving I thanked the man and wished him a nice day (I always try to with people), he seemed somewhat taken aback and seemed genuinely surprised that I said that. He sincerely returned the comment and I believe we’ll both have a better day for it. I know I did.

So after reading Michael Arrington’s article on why voicemail is dead I thought I’d think about how I use mine.

I’ve come across Spinvox before - it’s a service that converts voicemail (speech) to SMS and/or email, and decided to sign up for the trial today. I’m one of those people that is fairly good at responding to email, but not so much at voicemail. So the idea of having my voicemail direct in my inbox as an SMS means I can respond things to things much quicker.

After signing up (thanks Whatleydude) I had a few SMS based issues caused by my mobile operator and had to call up Spinvox customer service. I spoke to a really nice chap called Craig who gave me some really helpful pointers to ask T-Mobile, spoke to them, and called back Spinvox a few hours later. I spoke to Craig (he remembered who I was), said he’d make a couple of changes and give me call back when they were done. I’ve heard this before and so was pleasently surprised when he called back later to let me know it was all fixed.

I happened to be away from my phone when it happened so he left me a voicemail that was converted to text and SMS’d and emailed to me. It all works perfectly now!

This is exactly how customer service should work. Slick, personal, quick and efficent. I never once felt like the problems were my fault, and everything was resolved satisfactorily and beyond my expectactions.

I’ve learnt a lot from my dealings with Spinvox in a day and will be taking away a lot of what I have experienced to put into the way we deal with things both for Tactile CRM and Resolve RM.

Once again, thanks Craig and Whatelydude at Spinvox, you’ve restored my faith in customer service, you have a great product and given me lots to think about.

With everything that is going on here at Senokian with the build of Resolve RM and the ongoing day to day work with Tactile CRM, I haven’t been able to follow Carsonified’s build of their Matt application as closely as I would have liked.

I think it’s an interesting project to build an application in four days and see how it grows.

Obviously it won’t start/end in that period, they will have spent a fair amount of planning things before hand and will have to deal with ongoing support, maintenance, and development (if it is a success) of the application. But I like the process of documenting things in the same way that we are doing so here at Senokian for the build/launch of Resolve RM in our ‘Diary of yet another startup!‘.

So far they have been busy with the app, but I hope next week there will be more information on the launch, PR and marketing side of the application and how that has gone. So far they only mentioned the embargoing of content to various blogs, and Ryan getting people to digg articles. This is an area I am particularly interested in and would hope to see more about in the coming weeks.

Good work Carsonites. I hope it all falls into place. Here’s the timelapse video of one of their days work (the Carsonified website seems fairly slow at the moment):

Matt Week - Day One Time Lapse from Carsonified on Vimeo.

I’m not an angry man and it takes a lot to irritate me, but O2 have managed it today.

Rewind a few weeks to the announcement by Apple that the 3G iPhone is being launched on the 11th July. I patiently waited for O2 to update their website, and registered to be kept updated (nothing has been emailed to me as of the 1st July). In the meantime I happened to be passing by my local O2 store after finding out other stores were pre-credit checking for the iPhone launch.

First bit of rubbish customer service by O2. It was a lunch time and there were four customers in the Coventy store. Two members of staff were on duty with a third on their lunch break. If I was running a retail store I’d schedule shifts so that staff lunches were not over the main lunch period of 12-2pm. That’s what happened when I worked at Waitrose.

So after a wait of 20 minutes I finally spoke to a lady and explained that I wanted to open a new business account for the iPhone with four handsets, pre-credit check so that I didn’t have to hand around on the launch date and what would I need to do:

Sorry sir, you can’t do that

Now I know that is not true, and explained that other people had been able to do it. She begrudginly walked off to ‘ask her manager’ who was hiding out the back of the store and not dealing with customers when it was busy.

She returned, said ‘oh yeah we can, you’ll have to come back on the 1st of July’. I asked her what I would need and she told me the various bits of paperwork I would need.

Fast forward to today. I rang the O2 store in Coventry, asked if I could come in and pre-credit check for a business account, and double checked the paperwork I would need. The man I spoke to on the phone confirmed the paperwork and said I could come in today and do it. I double checked this would be OK for the business account and was assured this was the case.

An hour later I arrived at the store. Same story - busy at lunch with a long queue. I had anticipated this and needed to do some banking. I did this, came back half an hour later and the queue had gone.

I explained to the man what I wanted to do, he sat me down and began the process.

Next mistake he tried to credit check me as a personal user.

The man then had to ring his manager (who was off), couldn’t get through, rang the Birmingham branch, the person wasn’t available and waited for a call back. 30 minutes later after lots of waiting and trying different numbers he finally spoke to another colleague who dis-interestingly said it wasn’t possible.

The young man explained that they had been told about the pre-credit/iPhone process yesterday and that they hadn’t received all the relevent training.

At this point I have wasted a good 2 hours of time, got fairly frustrated and feel like 02 don’t want the £4,000 they are going to make from me.

I find it hard to beleive that the second time round O2 are still disorganised, don’t have a process in place for the iPhone sale and generally can’t be bothered to take my money or make their (and my) life a bit easier by doing things in advanced.

Right now I’m feeling like a really can’t be bother switching to O2 and the iPhone  isn’t really worth all the hassle. I have been chasing O2, wasted my time, put up with rude staff and had to deal with a lack of competence and training.

If I could get the iPhone on another network I certain would (Orange’s customer service was fantastic when I was with them), at the moment it’s doubtful I will get one at all. Right now, O2 your organisation and customer service is awful.

I get a lot of speculative CVs through the post?! and email from various people.

This in itself isn’t a problem -  we have an area on our website that explains what we like to see in an application, details of student placements, and what it is like working with us. We pay attention to detail, although we’re not quite this bad. We are also very firm with recruitment agencies as we get a lot of irritating calls and haven’t had any good experiences with them (a sentiment echo’d by many).

Normally I deal with each one and respond with an email. Today was different. I got a random CV from a student, covering letter and all, that didn’t once include their email address. Now it just so happens that we don’t have any student placements at present, but with only a phone/mobile number I have no way to contact them unless I ring, which I don’t want to.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to speculatively apply for a job with us, at lease include your email address.